Musings about Death
Death is inevitable. It is something no one aspires to and yet no one can escape it.Thinking about death can be both beneficial and harmful. For short-sighted people, it is harmful because it depresses and discourages them and makes them think of the futility of living in this world. However, they are wrong because they see only the part that dies.
There are 2 parts to every person,, the part that dies and the part that doesn't. Wise people don't see death as anything strange or out of the ordinary. The more important question is whether death is accompanied by merit. Because the mind does not die. Instead, your last thoughts and karma determine the level of the mind, the place where it takes rebirth.
If you can develop ultimate goodness, the mind will become changeless and deathless and so you will attain Nirvana. However, most of us can't conceive of this truth because our ignorance hides it from us.
That is why as Buddhist, we need to learn to be mindful, to develop as much merit and accumulate as much good karma as possible for this will determine what brings happiness both in this world and in the next.
Merit to me means simply the happiness or well-being which results from doing good. Merit can come from the merit of being generous, the merit of observing the precepts and the merit of meditation. However, true merit only arises when they are rooted in mental states free from greed, aversion and delusion.
In life, merit gives you ease of body and mind. In death, your merits will follow you and determine your next circumstance of rebirth. Dying is like embarking on a journey and you therefore need to make preparations.
For Buddhist, it means (1) paying homage to the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha and accumulating merits in your lifetime; (2) observing the precepts and getting rid of gross defilements in word and deeds; and (3) meditation to gain insight into how to remove the hindrances. All these will become part of the resources in your baggage which you can bring with you and draw upon when you embark on that journey upon ending this life. If not, you will find yourselves ill-prepared and lacking in funds, resources or knowledge to make that journey to a good place.
For all of us, it is really not too late to start.
Page:
[1]